Black CameraPub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.10
Felisa Vergara Reynolds
{"title":"The Politics of Colonization in Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther","authors":"Felisa Vergara Reynolds","doi":"10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.10","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42749,"journal":{"name":"Black Camera","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48214531","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Black CameraPub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.13
A. Agina
{"title":"Remembering the Past: A Conversation with Afolabi Adesanya as Film Exhibitor","authors":"A. Agina","doi":"10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.13","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Afolabi Adesanya is known as a Nigerian filmmaker and a policy maker, but not as an exhibitor. His experiences at the first film exhibition company in Nigeria, the West African Pictures Company Limited (WAPCo Ltd.), have never been documented. Established in the 1930s by Syrian Lebanese brothers, the company’s ownership changed in the 1970s with the Indigenization Decree. Little is known of the early history of the company or its contributions to cinemagoing and film consumption in Nigeria; hence, Adesanya’s account of the period while he was at the helm of WAPCo Ltd. (2001–2005) is invaluable. In this interview conducted at the National Arts Theatre in Lagos, the first purpose-built multiplex facility in Nigeria, Adesanya reflects on the challenges of directing a cinema company that was bought by a real estate firm solely interested in turning a profit. It brings to the fore one of the reasons for the decline in cinemagoing in the 1980s and 1990s, which is the dearth of trained cinema business personnel and infrastructure.","PeriodicalId":42749,"journal":{"name":"Black Camera","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69689961","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Black CameraPub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.17
Delphine Letort
{"title":"Get Out from the Horrors of Slavery","authors":"Delphine Letort","doi":"10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.17","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores race as a visual condition in Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017), demonstrating how the use of photographs undergirds a reflexive strategy aiming at deconstructing the codes of black visuality enshrined in the legacies of enslavement. The use of horror as a generic frame renders visible the blindness that Richard Dyer associates with whiteness.","PeriodicalId":42749,"journal":{"name":"Black Camera","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43846339","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Black CameraPub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.02
{"title":"Still Got the News: Fifty Years Out on Finally Got the News","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.02","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42749,"journal":{"name":"Black Camera","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49169412","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Black CameraPub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.08
D. Brown
{"title":"The Survival of Big-Screen Cinema in South Africa","authors":"D. Brown","doi":"10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.08","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:South African filmmakers who were marginalized from the film industry under apart-heid are today making feature films but primarily for the small screen. The few making theatrical films for cinema face massive systemic challenges to produce and get their films to market, in particular filmmakers of color and especially those on the margins of race, gender, and sexual orientation. By referring to developments in Nigeria and by analyzing historical and contemporary developments in the South Korean film industry, some practical propositions are presented in this paper in relation to content creation and the expansion of the big-screen cinema infrastructure to transform and grow South African cinema.","PeriodicalId":42749,"journal":{"name":"Black Camera","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49208482","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Black CameraPub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.11
Ashley Hendricks
{"title":"Vanishing Point: Chadwick Boseman’s Body and the Still Image","authors":"Ashley Hendricks","doi":"10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.11","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The desire to read Chadwick Boseman’s body of work in a traditionally representational way is already complicated—in an interview with The Atlantic, Spike Lee describes his casting choice of Boseman in Da 5 Bloods: “Here’s the thing for me. This character is heroic; he’s a superhero. Who do we cast? We cast Jackie Robinson, James Brown, Thurgood Marshall, and we cast T’Challa. Chad is a superhero! That character is Christlike!” The conflation of Boseman’s body with these iconic figures moves beyond simply reading the image as representational specifically beside analysis of temporality. Lee’s film was released streaming in June of 2020, the same month that saw significant numbers of protesters supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, four months into a national response to a pandemic, and three and a half years into what felt like a never-ending presidential term. The narrative of the film takes this into account; it acknowledges the Black Lives Matter Movement and slides a notable side-eye to the Trump presidency. The film is timely, cutting, and grounded contextually in the here and now and significant for what it discloses, however, this paper is focused on how the still images which ground the film complicate the possibility of any full disclosure, and any clear, uncomplicated representation due to a collapse, leverage, and slippage of time. The question at the center of this analysis is: under what temporal circumstances does Boseman’s body have a chance in its ability to live up to (or perhaps trouble) over-representation? What must happen to give the body voice? This paper relies heavily on aesthetic interventions into race and visuality as posed by Alessandra Raengo, Grant Farred, and Fred Moten as well as the discussions of indexicality put forth first by Roland Barthes and deconstructed by Shawn Michelle Smith.","PeriodicalId":42749,"journal":{"name":"Black Camera","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42717456","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Black CameraPub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.16
Jasper Lauderdale
{"title":"“There Existed an Addiction to Blood”: Exhuming the Transtemporal Body","authors":"Jasper Lauderdale","doi":"10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.16","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In light of burgeoning mainstream and commercial interest in black horror, futurism, and surrealism in recent film and television, this article sets out to redress the relegation of the black vampire to the shadows of culture, both to illume its aesthetic and narrative innovations and to address the radical alterity and political potency of its speculative mythology with regard to time and the body. I approach the undead black body as a rhizomatic through line that collapses axiomatic temporal dimensions of past, present, and future into a coexistent, thickened, layered moment, and thus simultaneously reflects revisionist, alternate, and anticipatory modes of imagining resistant and revolutionary possibilities. Found lurking throughout black creative production, the black vampire offers a transmedial line of flight, a revolutionary revision of dominant practice that augments the black body, so consistently deprived of life throughout history and art, with immortality and a timeless point of view.","PeriodicalId":42749,"journal":{"name":"Black Camera","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43553618","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Black CameraPub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.03
{"title":"A Wide Shot: Expanding the Frame on Melvin Van Peebles","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.03","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42749,"journal":{"name":"Black Camera","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41909291","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Black CameraPub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.09
P. Ugor
{"title":"Archiving Africa: Notes for the Contemporary African Filmmaker","authors":"P. Ugor","doi":"10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.09","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:First presented as a keynote at the 8th I-Rep International film festival in Lagos, Nigeria, in March 2018, this paper triangulates the links between processes of archivization, African filmmaking, and activist cultural work. The central task I set for myself in the paper is to answer the question, why should the African filmmaker be interested in archives and processes of archivization, especially in the age of digital media and the politicization of culture? By “archives,” I am referring to the artefacts generated for the filmmaker in the form of historical traces in the public domain and the texts s/he creates in the form of cultural narratives. Drawing links between archival work, film-making and the politicization of culture, I argue for a recognition of the strong relations between culture, politics, and social transformation, and submit that an awareness of how these three realms are interconnected should occupy the interest of the modern African filmmaker. Part of the wider argument I make about the potential of archives as a narrative resource in African filmmaking is to nudge contemporary African screen media producers to embrace what Hal Foster refers to as “an archival impulse at work internationally in contemporary art” in which art functions to reinvent archives from mere “excavation sites” into “construction sites” for counter narratives and memory.","PeriodicalId":42749,"journal":{"name":"Black Camera","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47268752","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Black CameraPub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.15
J. Hawkins
{"title":"Vanilla Nightmares and Urban Legends: The Racial Politics of Candyman (1992)","authors":"J. Hawkins","doi":"10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.15","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Candyman (dir. Bernard Rose, 1992) is considered one of the best horror-noire films of the 1990s. Certainly it’s one of the smartest. Adapted from Clive Barker’s short story “The Forbidden,” Candyman traces two intertwining plotlines. One has to do with miscegenation and a haunting, haunted love affair. A nineteenth-century white woman fell in love with the black artist hired to paint her portrait; when she became pregnant her family exacted a horrific revenge—against the artist, of course. His ghost haunts the present. The other story has to do with urban “renewal,” the creation of Cabrini-Green, urban drug violence, and the difficulties confronting contemporary black residents of Chicago. The way these two stories come together, intermingle, and ultimately re-segregate is part of what I want to explore in this essay. I am interested in the irreducible and unresolvable conflict between the film’s two diegetic strands and the different knowledges they represent. I’m also interested in what they have to tell us about the racist history that haunts this country, that will not be laid to rest until some kind of justice is exacted, and that continually calls into question everything we think we know.","PeriodicalId":42749,"journal":{"name":"Black Camera","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45315860","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}